This month I interviewed Old Navy’s director of digital and social innovation, Taylor Bux as part of a monthly series highlighting the social strategies behind some of the industry’s most digital savvy brands and retailers.

During our interview, Bux revealed an interesting tactic Old Navy uses for working with its wide variety of influencers.

The retailer has created a three-tier system to categorise the different talents it works with to best fit its various digital properties. And the result? A pretty innovative – and efficient – social strategy. Here’s how Bux explains the three layers…

1. Top tier: “Influencers and talent with lots of reach, brand credibility, and people we can call on at certain times of the year. One example would be the partnership we have with the designers who founded denim brand Current/Elliott and the way they could speak to and create credible fashion content for us.”

2. Sandwiched in the middle: “Evergreen relationships, which are the bulk of your fashion bloggers. They tend to be a core cast we work with and we rotate out depending on how they perform through metrics and engagement. We work with Collectively Agency to source these influencers.

The final tier – which it’s working on developing – is its “brand evangelist” group. The company doesn’t have a paid relationship with this set of influencers, but is constantly identifying and figuring out who they are. Bux says…

3. Third tier: “We’re tracking, categorising and engaging our brand evangelists regularly, and are currently trying to connect our social ambassadors with our actual ambassadors determined by online sales data. This means matching our real CRM database with our informal social database we’ve created on the back-end.”